STOR-i Alumni, Dr Jake Clarkson, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Inria Sophia Antipolis-Méditerranée Research Centre in Nice, has been recognised by the OR Society for the 'Most Distinguished Body of Research leading to the Award of a Doctorate in the field of OR' in 2021. An annual award, it is presented to the winner at The OR Society’s Blackett Lecture in November each year.

Jake's thesis was titled ‘Optimal Search in Discrete Locations: Extensions and New Findings’.

Jake’s supervisor, Kevin Glazebrook, commented:

‘The analysis of search problems has been a major focus of (inter alia) military OR for decades. The subject of Jake’s doctoral work was proposed by Professor Kyle Lin of the Operations Research Department of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA under the strategic academic partner programme of the STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training. In his thesis, Jake secures two major extensions to classical search results achieved six decades ago by Blackwell and others.

In the first of these, Jake posits that (motivated by the emergence of a range of modern search technologies) there are alternative search mechanisms (labelled fast and slow) available to the decision-maker. The problem then becomes not only where to search (the exclusive focus of the classical work) but also how. This development poses major challenges to analysis. It emerged in the course of Jake’s work that at least one incorrect analysis of this problem had secured publication (by an eminent author) previously. In Jake’s work, theoretical work provides both solutions for certain instances of the problem, but (more importantly) powerful insights which facilitate the development of strongly performing heuristics in general. This first part of the thesis has already been published in Operations Research.

The second part of the thesis concerns a game theoretic formulation in which an adversarial hider seeks to make the search as difficult as possible. This game is semi-infinite and considerable technical innovation is required to secure a successful analysis. A major paper covering this part of the work has been submitted to another top operational research journal.

One of the external examiners, a senior academic and the UK’s leader in the field of search games, stated it was the best thesis he has examined.

Commenting on the award, Jake said, "I'm delighted to have won the award! I'd like to thank my supervisors, Kevin and Kyle, for all their hard work and guidance; the STOR-i CDT itself for its continual support; plus all the friends I made there, who ensured my time at STOR-i was so enjoyable.”